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A friend of mine in college installed Slackware my freshman year, which his sister had been using for some time, I might add. I logged in a few times, and this was my first experience with Linux (I still like color ls). I had used Solaris 2.6 for Sparc for assignments in the engineering computer lab by this time. Later on, as with many current Freenix users, I'd try a UMSDOS-based Linux distro. After much reading, I bought several CD's with the most popular distros at a time. I was ineffective in installing any of them, including Red Hat 4.2, which did not appear to recognize my S3 Virge.
My first operating system was Windows 95 upgrade. I purchased NT 4.0 the following fall, and installed it successfully. I probably used it full time, being impressed by the relative stability. That Christmas, I bought Red Hat 5.0, CDE, WABI, and two books, one of which was probably my FreeBSD book. Red Hat 5.0 was as easy to install as NT 4.0. And after reading up on partitioning and many failed attempts, I had Win95, NT4, and RH5 all on my computer, nicknamed Milla. A month later or so, I had CDE, WABI running Lotus SmartSuite, printing and internet access in Linux. I was able to use Linux full full time. It was possible even in early 1998, and I had done it.
Today the situation is even better. CDE and WABI are in the past, but there's no need for them. The community has both GNOME and KDE desktop environments, and OpenOffice, among numerous other end-user applications, is freely available. And hardware support has never been better on all fronts.
I didn't bring my computer the following year in college, thinking it would be too much of a distraction. But I got into eBay and started making money. And, in late 1998(?), I bought a 486DX2/80 with a whopping 500+ MB hard drive for about $40 including shipping. I installed 32MB's of RAM a friend gave me. It is important to note that at this time I had a 386/20,8M,80M recovered from a dumpster and set it up for text based web browsing and e-mail. With all the disk space and memory on the 486, nicknamed Uma, I first installed DOS and set up networking and a graphical web browser. It was painful, but I told myself otherwise. Then, I installed Windows 3.1 and Opera. It was faster, but Win3 was ugly. I probably tried NT4, but I don't think it liked my computer. Then I thought, 'Linux?' Red Hat was a really tight fit, and I didn't like having to manually remove so many packages. But it worked, and networking went zoom. I was even able to play MP3's, unlike in DOS. But I was in a cramped space with limited applications, so you may guess that I wasn't 100% happy.
You have to understand that operating systems are a hobby of mine. And that I was forced to reinstall Windows 95 many times during the first 6 months I used it, and so I wasn't intimidated by the fear of losing all my data. You sort of get used to that idea in the Windows world. However, I did probably back up my dot.fvwmrc file prior to putting in that FreeBSD boot diskette, though. In actuality I probably tarred my whole home directory, including MP3's, and uploaded it to a friend's ftp server. The install probably didn't work the first time, but it probably worked the second. I had installed FreeBSD via ftp. And while downloading my backed-up home directory to my FreeBSD box, I probably noticed something. Networking was a hell of a lot faster than in DOS or Windows, and faster than in Red Hat 'out of the box.' I mark this time as the beginning of my actually learning about UNIX-like systems, instead of being what amounts to an end-user.
The FreeBSD Handbook is probably among the greatest resources for people who are new to UNIX-like systems and would like to learn more about them. With this documentation at hand, I popped my kernel recompilation cherry [successfully] on FreeBSD 2.2.8. On reboot with the new kernel my system felt as if it was just upgraded. I'd do other optimizations that I read about, and the system just became more and more responsive. It rocked. At no time was I waiting for FreeBSD on my 486. It worked just as fast as I did. And my computer running FreeBSD, including networking, was more reliable than my friends' much newer computers running Windows OS'. Here's an example of a typical load. I had multiple Netscape 4.x windows up (usually more than 10), and I played mp3's in the background, albeit with the command-line-based mpg123. I probably had other windows up, and xfs, telnet, and ftp servers in the background, and it was always responsive. I'd even serve my 386 which I'd converted to an X Terminal. I'd be very happy with my computer, for a while, until the money burned a hole in my pocket big enough for a fairly modern computer to fit through.
In retrospect, this fairly modern computer was a nice one, but it had so many incompatibilities, which was a problem since I used my computer to test hardware I was selling on eBay. I think with even the last BIOS, or equivalent, revision to date of every component of that computer that it'd still be flaky. Gotta love x86 hardware. I'd later 'downgrade' to my current computer, nicknamed Taz, a much more standard, and reliable, configuration.
But, yes, I'd initially install FreeBSD 3.0 [exclusively] on my new computer. And I'd sell my 486, which would be my favorite system in memory for many years. But FreeBSD 3.0 didn't take advantage of my new hardware, and that nagged at me. And I had started playing online FPS,' albeit on my friend's computers. Yes, I'd demonstrate to my friends how fast FreeBSD is on modern hardware by opening every program I had and then starting probably hundreds of Netscape 4.x sessions, and have the system still responsive [and not thrash, much less crash]. But in time I gave into the dark side, and I played games. And until rather recently, I've used primarily Windows systems.
What the Open Source community can do in a few years! Earlier this year, I used Red Hat 7.1 exclusively for a month or so, mainly because I didn't have broadband and couldn't get equivalent functionality in a Windows system without piracy. It was a good experience, but I insisted on fvwm2 and didn't bother with GNOME or KDE. As I write this I'm using NEdit, a Motif based text editor, Motif window manager, while listening to mp3's with XMMS, on an installation of NetBSD 1.6 that is much more useful to me than my Win2k one on this same computer. And I'm using Korn shell again! Hmmm, this is an almost equivalent environment to the one I had with the 486 and FreeBSD (having my first UNIX-like experience being with UNIX and CDE...). But this was originally supposed to be a review of Red Hat 8.0, and how far it has come from version 5.0.
Given my particular multi-OS configuration, I had to do a custom install. Red Hat 5.0 gave me unprecedented control over my computer, and it was easy for me to configure it, through the use of the provided graphical tools at that, for my needs. As I have said, at this time I've cut my teeth on NetBSD, but installing version 8.0 of perhaps the de facto Linux, if not UNIX-like, system, left me really impressed.
It's so pretty. You really have to see it first hand.
To date, this is the most pleasant 'first time' Linux, if not UNIX, experience I've had to date. Yes, technically, Linux can be set up more easily on certain hardware than any Windows system. I've tried Knoppix. Yes, there's KDE and Gnome. But Bluecurve feels like something else entirely. Maybe it's the pretty icons, or maybe it's the font rendering. It is GNOME, and I have to admit I've never really used GNOME, but the default environment I booted into with Red Hat almost makes me want to give up my traditional, relatively spartan, [NetBSD] environment. I am starting to believe that my mother could learn to use it out of the box, so to speak, and she is disoriented if the desktop wallpaper is different from the one she is used to at work. Everything just seems to fit together. I've never had this feeling on a Freenix system much less a hint of it. And it's functional too. Everything included by default, and accessible through the menu, with the exception of MP3 and DVD playback, are things typical home users would find useful.
Getting under the hood a little, one of the things I do first with a UNIX-like system after installation is disable unused services or daemons. It was easy enough to do with Red Hat 8.0, almost like in Red Hat 5.0. It's not 'secure by default,' but I feel I can effectively secure a Red Hat 8.0 box for an end-user installation, though I have to admit that I feel my experience with less 'user-friendly' OS' facilitates this. It was interesting to see that a 'Minimal' install was possible, as well, in the case you want to use Red Hat 8.0 in a slightly different application than intended by default.
On a final note, aside from the disk space requirements, I really like Red Hat 8.0 and heartily recommend it to anybody interested in using a more stable, more functional out of the box, freely distributable operating system. But this article wouldn't be complete if I didn't plug the operating system I use today, though, which is NetBSD. If you're interested in learning how UNIX-like operating systems work, or rather how they should work, or if you're just a control freak like me, then I recommend NetBSD. No, there's no Nvidia support, not yet anyway. But, there is growing ports system in place as well as Linux binary compatibility (not emulation!). And on Taz, it's more functional than any of the other OS' I currently have installed.
It's all free. No money aside from the cost of media, or piracy, is necessary to get much needed functionality. You will never be forced to upgrade your computer or pay for an OS upgrade that amounts to bug-fixes. It's more secure, or at the very least, it can be secured (Windows systems cannot be secured, except maybe without a network connection nor a power cord). It's extremely reliable all-around. You will become part of a helpful and knowledgeable community and not have to depend upon a company whose policy is to deny or ignore the existence of security holes or bugs. You can increase your productivity significantly with computers by learning the UN*X way of doing things. With a little invested time, you'll wonder how you got along without it. Or you can choose to do many of the same things the same way, albeit with a little self-re-training. And, last of all, it's fun.
If you can boot from your CD-ROM drive, I suggest giving Knoppix a test-drive, no pun intended. For actually installing on one's hard disk, I recommend Red Hat 8.0 if that wasn't already obvious. You will have to read about partitioning regardless, unless you have a separate computer, or hard drive, to play with. By the way, Wal-Mart dot com sells Linux preloaded PC's for $200 plus shipping. There are 'partitionless' installs, but I can't recommend these.
If you are more advanced (e.g. you know a lot about hardware, or have previous UNIX experience), I strongly suggest Debian GNU/Linux, or a derivative thereof, Linux or any of the BSD's. Of the BSD's, FreeBSD is the easiest, most compatible, and, some may say, the highest performing operating system on the x86 platform.
One of the best, and perhaps worst, things about Freenix systems is you can choose whatever interface you want. On the command line, I suggest bash, or Bourne Again Shell. I use pdksh, or Public Domain Korn Shell, which is backwards compatible with the standard Bourne shell and mostly compatible with what may be considered the official UNIX shell. If I did not have the choice of bash nor ksh, then I'd use csh or tcsh. The Emacs of shells, is, of course, zsh, or Z shell.
On the graphical side of things, the three most popular window managers and desktop environments include KDE, GNOME, and Windowmaker. KDE is perhaps the de facto standard and is more mature than Gnome. Bluecurve is based on GNOME, which in turn, because it is not based on the Qt library, is available on commercial UNIX systems. Windowmaker emulates Nextstep's interface and is the official window manager for GNU. It is fully configurable without editing text files. Others worth noting include Enlightenment, the Emacs of window managers, Blackbox and Icewm, both written from scratch, and, Motif window manager, which may be considered standard in the [commercial] UNIX world.
Use Debian, Windowmaker, and bash.
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